Photographer Anthony Kurtz visited Femme Auto in Senegal and took portraits of the mechanics and auto body workers there. They're really gorgeous shots, and it's always great to see badass women doing it to it in a male dominated field.

In this video making the rounds, a woman named Marième, who lives in Senegal, goes to get her gums tattooed black. "I want black gums to obtain a more beautiful smile," she says. "It's become an obsession." Later, she admits: "I'm scared." As she should be! The procedure, which takes place outdoors using handmade…

For years human rights organizations have been working to put an end to the tradition of cutting off a girl's clitoris, which an estimated 92 million African women and girls have been subjected to. Particularly rapid progress is being made in Senegal, thanks to a local movement that addresses the problem with…

Connie was Italian, heavily tanned and probably in her fifties. She wore white clothes which all seemed to say "disco" on them. We wondered what she'd been doing in Santiago de Cuba for months—til we saw her boyfriend.

When Senegalese activist Marietou Diarra began to tell the story of the two daughters she lost to genital mutilation, it didn't matter that almost no one else in the room spoke Wolof. You could have heard a pin drop.

This weekend, a 70-year-old man opened fire on a rap concert in the Matam region of Senegal after he felt insulted when rappers started to sing about "cranky old men." Five people were injured. [Reuters]

Robert M. Baum of the University of Missouri has been conducting research on the Diola people of (what is now) Senegal for nearly 30 years. Despite his many visits and increasing status level within the Diola communities (and his access to male religious leaders and male religious shrines), he continued to be stymied…